‘This is not what I normally wear,’ she wants to yell. ‘Believe me.’ Why has she worn this particular dress which barely comes up to her ankles? Because of her research: her Bible, her religion. She had read that it would be hot and humid. That her uniform of suits and slacks would not do. She thought she was equipping herself for the heat. She didn’t take into account the difference of culture: that this was not the thing to wear in a small village in India; that she would stick out like a green bean in a basket of red peppers. She is fast learning that research alone is not enough, that it will not do in this country.
Matt had whistled when she had tried the dress on. ‘Too short?’ she’d asked. ‘Perfect,’ he’d said, leaning in for a kiss. Matt… she misses him so. She wishes he was here with her.
‘So, what have you decided to do?’ he had asked that evening, in the wake of her conversation with Sister Priya. They were in bed, that soft, quiet time just before sleep lay claim like a grasping landlord. Matt was bathed in a warm gold glow, dulcet like the nun’s voice.
‘I need to go to India, Matt. I want to know why I was given away. I want to find my roots, discover who I am. And find her. My sister.’
Matt had nodded. ‘I know.’
‘I will take time off work. I am owed some anyway. ’ She was owed a hell of a lot of leave. She taken barely any since she had started working at the firm to which she had been recruited straight from university.
And, ‘Do you want me to come?’ he had asked. ‘I could do the same—get the leave owed me.’
She concentrated on fiddling with the golden down on his chest so he wouldn’t see the sudden tears that pricked her eyes. He had offered; that meant so much to her. She would carry that around with her: a cherished gift. She wouldn’t admit it to him but as much as she was excited, she was also scared. What if her sister didn’t want to know her, had known about her and had decided not to make contact? There was no point dwelling on the negatives, on these questions, these fears that lurked like burglars and pounced when she was at her most vulnerable.
She had blinked the truant tears away, looked up at him and smiled. ‘I need to do this on my own.’
He had nodded, kissing the strand of her hair that he was twirling, black wings adorning pink fingers. ‘I love the way your eyes shimmer with all the emotion you find so hard to express but that I know is in there,’ he had said. ‘Come back to me.’
‘I will,’ she had whispered. And, ‘Matt, what if all this changes me, irrevocably?’ With the letter, she had lost herself, the snug knowledge of who she was. And now, with the discovery of her sister, this journey into the past, to a different country in search of her roots… she was losing all her bearings, the constants she had taken for granted. When all this was over, would she come to terms with the person she would eventually become? Would she even like her?
‘You are already changing, Nisha,’ Matt’s eyes were soft, ‘in here,’ lightly touching her chest where her heart nestled, buffeted by her rib cage.
Her eyes must have betrayed her worry, her fear, for he continued, ‘When you remembered the dream for the first time, you told me that you couldn’t believe that that imaginative girl was you. Everything that you have experienced, it is all inside you. Let it come out. Give yourself permission to change. Don’t fight it. Inside it all, you are a wonderful person, a woman who is as giving and loving as she is intelligent. Find your parents, reunite with your sister and, in the process, you will find yourself. And after, come back to me.’
What had she done to deserve this wonderful man? She was blessed.
‘I will do anything for you,’ he had said then, suddenly, fiercely, his hand on her chin, willing her to look into his eyes, so close that she could see the tiny beads of sweat flecking the tips of blond stubble.
She squints, pushing away sudden tears that threaten, that seem to be ambushing her all the time now, like the emotions that seize her at odd moments, making up for lost time.
She is tempted to go back to the hotel and change but nothing in her wardrobe constitutes clothes that will withstand this weather and earn the respect of these women and the inattention of the men, who hitch up their lungis and open their mouths lasciviously at the sight of her. She thinks longingly of her suits; even though she would boil to death in them here, they would at least have afforded some privacy from the unabashed, intrusive stares. She needs a new wardrobe. She needs an umbrella, like most people here, as a shield against the sun. She is jet-lagged and tired and the thought of lying down in her air-conditioned hotel room, a pillow on her face, nudges in, vies for attention, tantalising. But the need to know that has ballooned into an all-consuming urge, that had made her book her flight the very evening after she called the convent for the second time and heard the soft, musical voice of the nun and was assaulted by memories spilling out of that secret corner of her mind, that same need is now propelling her to visit with Sister Priya, to go straight to the convent, see if it is as she remembers, as she recalls in her vivid dreams, as it is painted in her memories.
Once she had booked her ticket, knowing she was definitely going to India, she had slept—a blessedly dreamless, healing sleep for the first time since losing her parents. And that pull for answers, that urge to find her sister, to meet the nun who called to her from the past via her dreams, had allowed her to say goodbye to the one person who was her constant in an ephemeral world, to leave him standing at the airport, waving, to not turn back once she’d said goodbye, to resolutely walk right on and turn only once she was sure she was concealed from sight. The sight of him: his hand still up in the air, scanning the faces, waving desperately, hoping, she knew, that she would see him somehow, even if he couldn’t see her, his face bereft, expression lonely like a forlorn child. She had carried it with her in the nine-hour flight, while the lady next to her fell asleep on her shoulder, while the air hostess kept bumping her legs as she walked up and down the aisle, while the toddler in front screamed relentlessly all through, except for a blessed half an hour when he fell asleep and his mother sobbed out of sheer exhaustion—throughout she carried her lover’s face with her, his expression, his words whispered in her ear as he held her close before letting her go. ‘I love you. Come back to me.’ His lemony-musk smell, the mint on his breath. ‘I will,’ she had said. And, ‘I need you, Nisha,’ he had mouthed, lifting her face which lay on his chest, memorising the rhythm of his heartbeat, and kissing her lips, tasting of salt and sorrow and love and loss. And she had squirreled that assurance away in a corner of her heart, for use when she was lonely, as she was bound to be, in a country and place she knew only from dreams and memories which had suddenly surfaced after a hiatus of twenty-odd years.
She had reached Mangalore that morning, after a hair-raising flight in that little bumpy plane, which she was sure was going to crash on the stony hills hugging the narrow landing strip on both sides. When, in Bangalore, a jolting bus had conveyed the passengers travelling to Mangalore to the little plane, she had wanted to ask, ‘You are joking, right?’ It did not look big enough to carry her suitcases let alone her plus the several other passengers waiting to board. She had kept her fingers crossed the whole way. She, who believed in facts not luck. It had been a particularly jerky ride, the tiny plane buffeted by winds and rain. As it readied to land, as it swooped down over the hills, twinkling green and steep, rocks jutting out on all sides, she had closed her eyes and Catholic prayers rusty from disuse had slipped into her head and held court: old friends reuniting. And the surprising thing was that she had let them and they had calmed her, these mindless chants recited by rote. She, Nisha Kamath, for whom not two weeks ago, mathematics, the solid rigidity of numbers, had been religion.
And here she is now, with not so much as breakfast in her stomach. She had been too nauseous after the rough flight, nerves fluttering around her stomach like a bevy of hungry moths, to even think about food. She is not sure what she will find, what lies in store for her. What if the nuns cannot di
g up any record of her adoption, or even, as the nun who spoke to her said, any record of her ever having stayed there? What if Sister Priya doesn’t remember her even during her lucid moments, denies all knowledge of a child ever having lived in the convent? How to find her parents, her sister, in this country of over a billion people? Where to start?
And what of her memories? How to explain them—how real they feel, as if, if she reached back into the past, she could touch them: smell the fragrant jasmine tinged with bitter lime; taste Sister Shanthi’s famous dahi vadai—the tanginess of the dahi, the sweetness of the tamarind chutney; hear the crows holding court among the coconut trees on a dew-sparkled morning, the air carrying a hint of the previous night’s monsoon shower and a promise of more to come; feel the Eucharist bread disintegrate on her tongue while executing the sign of the cross? How to explain the fact that she knows all the Catholic prayers and litanies, recognises all the saints, remembers all the festivals and the elaborate rituals that go with them even though she hasn’t set foot inside a church, not counting one school trip when she was nine, in twenty years?
Her heart does a nervous little flip. Oh, well, she’s here now; she’ll find out what she can and then go home. To Matt. A sigh of longing at the thought of him. Those warm blue irises flecked with yellow. The full mouth tilted upward in an inviting smile at the sight of her. His kisses, oh those kisses, as if with each he was imparting a part of himself. ‘I need you, Nisha,’ he had said, his eyes shining, liquid. ‘Come back to me.’
I will, Matt. I will.
Buses painted all the colours of the rainbow race past, screaming and screeching, overflowing with people who spill out the two openings, one at the front of the bus and one near the back, hanging on to the pole for dear life, their clothes puffed up by the wind and their hair flying in a frizzy halo around their heads. They ogle and grin and wolf-whistle at her and she silently wills them to concentrate on holding on; she doesn’t want a death on her conscience on top of everything else. The air carries a salty tang of sea and the zing of spices. People urinate by the side of the road; children walk to school, chattering happily, their backs weighed down by satchels almost as big as them; a woman prays at a roadside shrine: a figure of a deity set into a wall and obscured by garlands, her eyes closed, hands folded, oblivious to the noise and bluster around her; little huts conduct brisk business selling deep-fried snacks a suspicious bright orange in colour, tea in tiny aluminium tumblers, pyramids of tender coconuts, diminutive bananas shaped like question marks hanging in bunches from the thatched roof.
Her stomach growls ominously as it is assailed by spicy aromas, as she clutches the piece of paper with the address of the convent and wanders the streets of Dhonikatte.
Her eyes had scrunched in the dazzling sunlight that assaulted her as she stumbled out of the airport and it was like walking into a steaming oven, inducing an instant headache. She had hailed a taxi blindly from the gaggle that descended on her. The taxi driver had recognised the name of the hotel where she wanted him to stop first so she could drop off her luggage but had not understood her accent when she tried to tell him the address of the convent, even though she spoke in Kannada, the lessons drummed into her by her parents on drowsy Saturday afternoons coming of use, wondering as she did if her parents had made her learn the language in the occasion of this very eventuality. ‘Slow, slow,’ the taxi driver said, pronouncing it ‘Slaaa, slaaa,’ his eyes never leaving her lips as he tried to read the words she was trying to say. However slowly she spoke, enunciating each syllable clearly, it wasn’t comprehensible to him. So she wrote the address down on a slip of paper and thrust it under his nose. He had nodded, scratched his head and then with the same hand, his crotch, giving his balls a tight squeeze, right in front of her. I must make sure not to touch his hand when I pay him, she had thought. She was pretty sure he was bare under that flimsy patterned fluorescent green cloth he was wearing in lieu of trousers.
He had driven her to what looked like the outskirts of town, a hair-raising, daredevil ride scarier than any rollercoaster she had ever been on. One that involved nudging other vehicles, cows wandering joylessly smack bang in the middle of the busy road, and even a bullock cart, out of the way hither and thither. They almost fell off the rickety bridge across a dun-coloured stream, the sluggish water reluctant to so much as ripple (would it splash if the car fell in, she had wondered, or sigh softly, poof as it swallowed up the car in one big gulp and continue to wear that ugly brown frown on its mud-spattered face?) all to the soundtrack of a multitude of blaring horns and yelling people. He had brought the taxi to a screaming stop in front of what looked like a pile of rubble, guarded by the skeletal remains of a building, by which time she had recited the Rosary, alien until recently, twice over in her head. One crumbling wall was all that remained upright of what had once been, she assumed from the framework, quite a tall building in this town of squat outcroppings. The lone wall had ‘Vote for Congress’ etched boldly in blue ink across it, under the inscription of the palm of a hand and several other indecipherable words in different scripts. It encircled a pile of rubble and disintegrating red brick, dotted with velvet moss and nodding weeds. The taxi driver had jumped out while she was still collecting her wits from where they were scattered all over the dirty floor of the Ambassador car masquerading as a taxi. He had held out his palm for his money, his tawny eyes curiously assessing her, the ghost of a smile lurking on his face as he took in her ashen demeanour, the way she had to hold on to the car as she stepped out on jelly legs.
‘This, aaaadress.’ He had said, pointing at the pile of rubble.
‘But…’ she began.
He nodded energetically, pointing to the piece of paper. ‘Aaaadress. Aaaadress.’
‘No, no,’ she tried again.
‘Yaas, Yaas,’ he had said, his head moving up and down like a fulcrum so vigorously that for a moment she worried it would fall right off.
She had given up, paid him and watched him drive away.
And now she is walking up and down, up and down, in the sugarcane-scented haze looking for someone to ask about the convent. The staring men disperse when she approaches. The women disappear into houses. She has not yet managed to find someone who will stay and talk to her.
She is well and truly lost. Her mobile phone doesn’t work—no reception. She did spot a little hut with a stripy yellow sign which declared in bold black letters, ‘STD/ISD/ Intrnet’. Were they aware of the spelling mistake on the board? She had walked inside, tried conversing with the proprietor who was swatting at flies, eyes glazed in that way that suggested he was trying to ward off sleep. ‘No Hingleesh,’ he had said, his gaze perking up at the sight of her. She had pointed to the computers, tried explaining in Kannada that she wanted to use them. As with the taxi driver, he did not understand her. ‘You can speak to me in Kannada,’ she had tried again, in Kannada, but she might as well have been speaking French. He had waved his hands, repeated, ‘No Hingleesh,’ and pointed upwards at a stationary ceiling fan, the blades encrusted with a thick coating of grime. She had scrunched up her nose in an effort to understand. He had sighed noisily, and walked up to the computers, old chunky models dating back to the early nineties. He had switched the monitors on and off. Nothing. Then she had understood. The computers were not humming. They were lifeless. There was no power.
So she cannot do research, find out where she is. And yet, strangely, she is not scared. If this had happened to her two weeks ago, she would have been terrified by the loss of control, besieged by utter helplessness brought on by the lack of devices by which to orient herself. No phone, no computer, no Wi-Fi. She would have felt bare, stripped to the core. Now, though, she is happy to wander, take this place in. When did this change take place, she wonders. Perhaps it is only fitting to find herself lost in a strange country when she feels lost inside, within herself. Or perhaps it is the languid feel to this place, the loamy red soil swirling gently in the leisurely breeze. The men dawdling with
index-finger-sized tumblers of sweet-smelling steaming caramel liquid outside thatched huts with holes for entrances, no doors, the dark interior yawning, the hole so small even the shortest man has to stoop to enter. The women sitting on verandas, their legs stretched out and holding wicker baskets, paan-filled mouths and weathered hands both working nonstop. They fill herby dung-coloured powder onto tissue paper the pale pink of the inside of a fingernail and roll it busily. Close to, the spicy aroma of the powder makes her sneeze. A young man sneaks across and whips one of the rolled-up tubes, lights it with a match, breathes in deeply. The women shriek, make to smack him. He laughs and walks away, wisps of pungent smoke colouring the air around him, and Nisha realises it is a form of cigarette they are rolling.
Dhonikatte is a quaint little village, she muses as she walks. Squat buildings in various hues contrast with orange-tiled brick houses, looking like the houses in storybooks. No one seems to be in a rush except the buses which race past, stuffed to bursting. Crows chatter on telephone poles, black buttons silhouetted against a sky that is so blue as to be almost white. This country, its people clad in colourful, worn, dusty clothes, sporting huge smiles, it is something else, she thinks. Her mind, which has been in continuous turmoil since she got the letter, seems to have for a brief moment settled, found peace. And all this without doing a single calculation in her head, she thinks, and the thought elicits a smile.
The Forgotten Daughter Page 20
